World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [106]
17
The economic picture of the Weimar Jews was thus a mixed one. Jews plainly did not control the Weimar economy. To the contrary, the wealthiest Germans in the Weimar Republic by and large were non-Jews: members of the nobility or landowning aristocracy as well as powerful industrialists such as Robert Bosch, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, and Hugo Stinnes.
18 On the other hand, almost no Jews were peasants, farmers, or members of the urban proletariat, and the average income of Jews was 3.2 times that of the general Weimar population.
19
It is crucial to reiterate that the “Jewish problem” in Germany was far more than an economic problem. As many have pointed out, anti-Semitic economic hostility “is necessarily predicated upon the antisemites’ marking of the Jews as being different, identifying them not by the many other (more relevant) features of these people’s identities, but as Jews, and then using this label as the defining feature of these people . . .”
20 The imagery and rhetoric used against German Jews was contradictory and confused. Thus, writes Gordon Craig, “the arrogant Jew” included “the flea-market and marts-of-trade and stock-market Jew, the Press and literature Jew, the parliamentary Jew, the theatre and music Jew, the culture and humanity Jew . . .” Although “materialist,” Jews did not work but only “exploited.” Jews were both greedy “capitalists” and the “secret force behind Communism.”
21
Nevertheless, regardless of the falsity of the charges of Jewish economic dominance, there was undeniably an economic dimension to the mobilization of German anti-Semitism. The stereotype of the Jew as rich and rapacious had long existed in Germany (as in many other European countries). Four hundred years before Hitler capitalized on this theme, Martin Luther wrote: “[T]hey hold us Christians captive in our country. They let us work in the sweat of our noses, to earn money and property for them, while they . . . mock us and spit on us, because we work and permit them to be lazy squires who own us and our realm.” Similar rhetoric accompanied the vicious wave of anti-Semitism following the financial crash of 1873. Fifty years later, Jews in Weimar were widely accused, by Germans high and low, of being “uniformly prosperous,” “ruling Germany financially, economically,” and causing the nation’s economic privations.
22 In other words, the Jews were said to be a grossly economically dominant outsider minority even though their actual level of economic success did not warrant this perception. As in many developing countries today, these charges of economic dominance provided a convenient spur to, and rationalization of, ethnic mobilization.
Weimar Germany shared another feature in common with most of today’s developing countries: Germany after the First World War embarked on a period of intense marketization and democratization. Whereas normal market transactions had ground virtually to a halt during the war, Germany after 1918 saw a massive influx of foreign investment, new international trade opportunities, a burst in industrialization, and the accumulation of huge fortunes by big business and financiers. Like today’s “emerging economies,” the Weimar government undertook freewheeling economic liberalization, for example by eliminating import-export quotas; offering tax breaks to businesses and holders of capital; and, after 1923, repealing significant labor-law protections including, perhaps most strikingly, the eight-hour workday.
At the same time, Weimar Germany pursued intense democratization. In 1918 and 1919, over a period of barely